Quotes About Intellect

All intellectual labor is inherently humorous

Walpole has no intellect. A mere surgeon. A wonderful operator but, after all, what is operating? . . . . Manual labour.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

A perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world.

it is seldom a medical man has true religious views—there is too much pride of intellect.

I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too.

Only those who know the supremacy of intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing, soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union.

It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable. He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life.

But I'll not throw away good knowledge on people who think they can get it by the sixpenn'orth, and carry it away with 'em as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to me again, if you can't show that you've been working with your own heads, instead of thinking that you can pay for mine to work for you. That's the last word I've got to say to you.

If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit

A lifeless embalmment of knowledge

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

When you engage your brain, it just keeps getting fatter and richer and wonderful.

People tend not to use this word beauty because it's not intellectual - but there has to be an overlap between beauty and intellect.

I find it satisfying and intellectually stimulating to work with the intensity, brevity, balance and word play of the short story.

In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all 'poetic' in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist.

All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

An expenditure of words without income of ideas will lead to intellectual bankruptcy.

Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture's primary mode of communication, a radical change because images work so differently than words: They're immediate, they hit you at levels way beneath intellect, they come fast and furious.

My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.

Richard Nixon is typically considered the modern exemplar of a dark and vindictive president. President Trump would be Nixon minus the keen intellect and work ethic.

Having played many roles of scientific intellect I do have an empathy for that world. It's been hard on me because flying the Enterprise for seven years in Star Trek and sitting in Cerebro in X-men has led people to believe that I know what I'm talking about. But I'm still trying to work out how to operate the air conditioning unit on my car.

I buy thousands of books a year.